Helping Transitioning Veterans Use Their Unique Skills in The Workplace

Spotlight Staff, posted on January 28, 2026
As military veterans look to transition into the civilian workforce, they need earlier intervention and assistance, more attention to food insecurity and firms that value the skills and attitudes they have developed during years of service.
Those were just some of the topline recommendations presented during a webinar, From Service To Stability: Navigating Financial Well-Being, Food Security, And The Civilian Workforce, presented last week by the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Approximately 200,000 service members transition from military to civilian life each year in the United States,” said Hallie Lienhardt, Outreach and Communications Manager at IRP. “This shift is a complex journey, and success hinges on more than just securing a new job. Recent research highlights interconnected challenges requiring more holistic considerations of financial stressors, household food security and integration into the civilian workforce.”
Dawne Vogt, Research Psychologist, Women’s Health Sciences Division, National Center for PTSD, Women’s Health Sciences Division, VA Boston Healthcare System, offered learnings from a longitudinal study of about 10,000 military veterans that has been compiling data since 2016.
“What we wanted to know is how well veterans navigate this transition,” Vogt said. Her three main proposals drawn from the data:
- Help veterans prioritize for this transition. Key tools could be more financial planning management training and helping veterans learn to prioritize savings.
- Bolster early intervention. Said Vogt: “I often talk about this idea of the snowball effect, but if we think in terms of when we have the best chance to influence longer-term outcomes for veterans, it’s at the time of separation, right? With the snowball effect, the idea is that. If we don’t address problems, they sometimes get bigger, they get a lot more intractable, and it gets harder to intervene.”
- Address unique needs of at-risk groups: Vogt said the study had found that veterans who have the most difficulty making successful financial transitions to civilian life are often enlisted personnel, younger veterans, Black veterans, and non-college graduates.
Food insecurity is another major challenge for transitioning veterans, said Nipa Kamdar, Investigator, Implementation, Innovation & Evaluation Program, Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness & Safety, Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, Houston.
Kamdar said her research has found that veterans are three times more likely to either reduce their intake or skip meals compared to their civilian counterparts. She also found that veterans who are food insecure had an almost 4 times increase in thoughts of suicide compared to food secure veterans.
“This is really important because, again, when a veteran is food insecure, they’re more likely to be on the more extreme side of that food security risk, which is also then associated with thoughts of suicide,” Kamdar said.
She said that solutions like SNAP and food pantries are important and useful but that a more holistic approach is needed that takes into account some of the reasons that veterans may be reluctant to use those services, such as stigma, mental health issues or lack of financial resources.
Daniel Peat, Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, reported on a literature review he has conducted on military-connected individuals that found veterans experience higher levels of employment turnover, higher unemployment, and very high levels of underemployment.
“Quite often, military-connected folks are hired for roles that don’t fully use their skills,” Peat said. “And quite often, their leadership and teamwork potential is often overlooked for various reasons.”
Peat urged prospective employers to be creative in looking for roles in which former military personnel can utilize their unique skills. “Military-connected people don’t generally lack skills. And they don’t really lack motivation, but these skills are built in a very different way,” Peat said.
